Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Glenn Reynolds: the Iraq Files

GEORGE BUSH IS NOW THE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN THE WORLD: People always say that about Presidents, of course, but usually it's only notionally true. Now, if he wants to nuke Baghdad, there is nobody to say him nay -- and damned few who would want to. That's a danger if he goes off half-cocked, but I don't think there's much risk of that. But I wonder: do the people behind this assault realize what this means?

Kennedy's remark is certainly getting a lot of play around the world, and it can only embolden our enemies and imperil our friends. And as an old Washington hand, Kennedy must have known that it would get that kind of attention, and have that kind of an effect. No wonder Powell is upset.

Reynolds then declares America is winning the Iraq war. He takes another shot at Iraq and declares that bloggers (himself) helped the war effort.

Success has a thousand fathers, and we'll see Ted Kennedy taking credit for Iraq before it's all over. But I'd like to think that blogs played a part in neutralizing psychological warfare on the part of the terrorists.

I remain unconvinced that we need more troops in Iraq. Afghanistan saw successful elections with far fewer U.S. troops. I'm not convinced that we don't, but we'd need a million troops to blanket all the polling places,and we're not going to have that. So what's the mission? Just as one seldom wins a war by slapping armor on everything (and no army in history has armored all its soldiers and transport vehicles), one seldom wins a war by dispersing forces to lots of locations in a "prevent" defense. That seems to be what the "more troops" crowd has in mind, but it strikes me as a poor idea.

UPDATE: Greg Djerejian and Andrew Sullivan (who are sounding more alike in general these days) are both charging me with a change in positions on troop numbers. It seems to me that neither Greg nor Andrew should be casting the first stones regarding changed positions, but here's the post that they claim shows "scorn" for the more-troops argument.

2 Comments:

I'd rather face waterboarding and cock torture then read Instacrackhead. I think this comment about Glenn on Balloon Juice today says it all: "Glenn Reynolds convened a blogger symposium to flex some of that rightwing intellectual muscle. Their ideas? War, war, war, war and war. Really. You f***ing killed parody, Glenn."